The creatures had been flying in Sephiri’s dreams for weeks, and they had even begun to take wing on his waking thoughts. And now, as he sat in the children’s playroom, he reached for a crayon and a leaf of construction paper with the gravity of an architect, his smooth, creamed-coffee face immobile, a single mole dotting his cheek. He stared down at the paper through two dark, luminous eyes, in which the sharp and bright edges of things flashed in reflection. He blocked out the mosaic of murals on the walls, the stacks of glossy unopened books, the piles of blocks, and the blank-faced children, each lost in an opaque realm of secret activity.

The gleam from the track lighting glazed everything in the room as if it had all been brushed by a baker’s egg white. There was the smell of lemon disinfectant, which he did not like, which hung always in the air like a toxic cloud. There was the flicker from the farthest bulb at the ceiling that caught his eye again, as it had for several weeks, a distracting affront to the even order of light. But Sephiri turned his mind away from all of that now. There was only the sheet of white, the crayon in his hand, the images in his head. He’d had dreams before in his seven years on the earth, terrible visions from the Land of Air. There were the shadows that peeled themselves from the walls in his room and chased him out of his bed. There was the red creature that hid inside his mattress, the impish thing that cut through the springs, its incandescent eyes staring up at him through a dark, gaping hole.

Those dreams were not like the loveliness of his World of Water, the realm of deep blue and luminescence where Sephiri spent much of his time floating. He loved to drift far out to the Obsidians, as his sea friends called them. They were the tips of submerged mountains, enormous peaks that rose from the water like black pyramids from the deep. They marked where the invertebrates and the spiked beasts and the water plants ruled. Sephiri loved them all. He could speak there and be understood. The creatures living there gave him assurance that all he witnessed and heard in that place was real.

He wasn’t sure about the creatures flying through his dreams. They weren’t anything like the creatures of the Land of Air. The caterpillars he’d squeezed between his fingers in the backyard. The flies on the glass rim of his orange juice. The spiders that hung in corners. They were not like the other things he was able to keep a photograph of in his mind after one look: the number of tiles on a floor, the license plates of cars along their street, the label of ingredients of everything in the medicine cabinet. His mother locked the cabinet, but Sephiri was able to get it open anyway. He adored the Tylenol and cold medication boxes and containers, which he would line up and then line up again. There were lists of active and inactive ingredients, with marvelous arrangements of letters, which he had memorized without understanding how to pronounce any of them: acetaminophen, dextromethorphan, phenylephrine, anhydrous citric acid, potassium sorbate. He loved the sodiums madly: sodium borate, sodium chloride, sodium laurel, sodium laureth, sodium bicarbonate, sodium benzoate, sodium citrate.

When he was finished with the ingredients, he would focus on the letters that spelled WARNING on each container. He recognized this word from the order of the letters and knew it was the same word on the big sign above the red emergency door at the Takoma Park Autism Center, where he spent nearly every day. There were other things written next to WARNING on the boxes. He didn’t know what any of those words meant, but he was sure they were trying to save him from tasting something disgusting. Sephiri thought the words, especially in this case, probably referred to various kinds of foods he hated. Say, squash or chicken, for example. Or nasty sandwiches, which he was sure had to be any sandwich that was not peanut butter and jelly.

He had gotten off the safety cap and swallowed some pretty blue pills once and had to be rushed to the hospital, screaming. There were maddening lights, sounds, and touching. There were white sheets that chafed his skin and cold, shiny things. Worst of all, there were no bathtubs anywhere—no porcelain baths filled with blue water, where he could calm down, where he could get away, out to the three mountaintops that rose from the ocean.

The beings—terrifying tangle of fingers and voices—had put him in the shower instead. He’d acted out his fury and fits with his eyes clamped shut but had to take a shower anyway. More than losing his voice from the screaming, more than the stuff they did when he was finally finished vomiting and had been cleaned with that dreadful soap that smelled like the bottle in the cabinet that read POLISH REMOVER, Sephiri was furious that he hadn’t had a chance to finish ensuring order in the medicine cabinet. He hadn’t had the chance to finish saving the Tylenol boxes from disarray, from their disconnection to their places on the earth.

After the blue pills, and only after his mother fell asleep, he would slip out of bed to open the cabinet, to order and reorder. He promised the boxes and bottles that he would never swallow anything from them again. He had hurt their feelings without realizing it. He had learned his lesson. He would put everything back as it had been, with each item turned at the exact angle of origination, with the pill packs arranged as they were and the lock clicked back in place. And he would get up every night to sanctify what was behind that mirror in the bathroom over the sink, with the distant sound of a freight train’s midnight whistle as his cue. Such activity was a deep balm to Sephiri, a way to make everything in the world fit in its precise position on the planet. As all things should. Not the jungle of confusion he was forced to witness, to waddle in, every day of his life.

But there had been nothing like these flying creatures, these wild things that had somehow found him in his head. And for many days and nights, they swarmed the hinterlands of his mind, riding his thoughts, replacing the shadows and the mattress thing, replacing even the medicine cabinet lately. The glowing amber in their bellies was warm and everlasting. That much he knew. They reminded Sephiri of the oily liquid inside his mother’s dusty perfume bottles, which he had spent considerable time ordering in the twilight of dawn when the house was still and asleep, when there was less interference from all the other things assaulting his eyes and ears. And every time Sephiri thought of the locusts, he wanted to smile; it was something his mother had often tried to get him to do, something he’d seen demonstrated on the faces of others but had never understood how it worked.

Smiles intrigued him. He spent many days thinking about them, especially at bathtime, when his mother often smiled at him in the quiet. He would scream to let her know that he did not want to be soaped up right away, that he had an important visit to make to the Obsidians, where he might ask the Great Octopus about smiles and other things he did not understand. He flailed and splashed. He knocked the soap from her hands and kicked up enough water to pool on the bathroom floor. Then he would hear the loudness, the oncoming train in her voice. “Stop it stop it stop it stop it stop it.” She hissed and held on. He persisted. He hadn’t had the time to stop it stop it right then. He had to get into his boat before the water got cold, before the tub stopper was pulled out and the tributaries were drained.

When at last his mother seemed to understand his signals, when she was as soaked and outraged from all the splashing as if she had been dropped into a circus dumping tank, she left him alone to calm down, to absorb the turquoise and warmth, to disembark. It was at frustrating moments such as this that Sephiri wished that they spoke the same language. But he did not speak the language of Air, the land of his mother. He did not understand how things were done there or what occupied the species. There were different sounds and faces that somehow ruled them, and these were attached to meaning that was unintelligible to him. He had no patience for the stops and starts that fell from their mouths. There was no sharing of thought and feeling as there was with his friends of the deep. Sometimes, though, when his mother tired of chasing him, when he tired of screaming, she held him, and he allowed himself to be held. They felt each other. That was as close as Sephiri had ever gotten to reaching his mother and penetrating the Land of Air.

He had discovered as early as two years old that Air and Water were different places with different ways and language. He had been playing with some colored blocks on the floor. He had wanted to line the blocks up and then line them up again. He remembered his mother picking up different blocks, saying something, and pointing. He did not look at her face, but he could see that finger pointing from the corner of his eye and her hand holding the block. She took his hand and placed it on each block, and he felt as if he was being pulled apart. He didn’t want to hold the blocks. He didn’t want to think about their shape and color and mimic her sounds. He had wanted only to line them up and line them up again. To ensure that they were where they were supposed to be. He tried to explain. But his mother did not comprehend him, and the more he tried to get her to understand, the more it became clear to him that she would never know his language.

Sephiri gripped the crayon and looked down at the paper, thinking instead of the fat-bellied locusts of his dreams again, for he did not want to dwell on things that would make him cry. Why had the locusts come? In his dreams, he saw them growing to bursting, pushing up and out of the earth, taking flight. Above his head, they were waiting, rising, and hovering, as if by their gathering they anticipated something. He began guiding the crayon, his hand moving effortlessly. He first drew the foreground and then sketched a vast plain. In the center, he constructed two towers with a giant iron gate connecting them and an enormous structure behind them. Sephiri didn’t know what it was, but it reminded him of the coat closet he locked himself into sometimes at home, but bigger. A giant black box that held things, with a voice that called to him from its farthest corner.

“Come here . . .”

He did not recognize the voice, and he was not sure what the two words meant. Especially together. He’d heard them said before at the Autism Center, and sometimes, he thought, his mother said them too. But he couldn’t decide if the two words were the same as other phrases he’d heard: “come home” or “can hear.” But all that was too much to figure out now, since the other things were so clear to him at last. His hand moved deftly, sketching enormous mountains in the background, a cloud of locusts flying over their peaks.

Sephiri furiously continued drawing, and at the height of his fever, he snapped his crayon. He threw the drawing down and watched the paper slide under the table. He was angry that his hand had not been able to keep up with his mind, one of many things that frustrated him about being in the Land of Air. He couldn’t stand the different regimens and schedules that were not of his own making, how the people were always telling and talking and asking, until it all became a sort of noise that ran together in his head. This place was filled with air, not water, where he felt at home.

He could float out to the realness of his World of Water, where the sea was an endless expanse as turquoise as the liquid in his ­bathtub. Where he didn’t have to try to understand the strange sounds of words dripping from mouths. He could head to his ­desired destination anytime he wanted, with only his little wooden boat gliding toward the three great black rocks that rose from the ocean. The dolphin waited for his company there, and the Great Octopus sat in majesty in his iridescent lair on the ocean floor. What concerned him in Air did not concern him in Water. He did not need the laws of physics to rein in his terrors, frustrations, and confusions there. He did not need to spin or bang or rock or flap. He could forget about the creatures flying in his dreams, the voice in the giant black box, the meaning of sounds and faces and smiles. He could forget about the words of Air and speak freely in Water, where the language of men was as indecipherable to his friends of the deep as it was to him. An encrypted thing to ponder briefly and release, like the dialogue of wolves and birds in flight.

Time of the Locust

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Time of the Locust

Locusts

The creatures had been flying in Sephiri’s dreams for weeks, and they had even begun to take wing on his waking thoughts. And now, as he sat in the children’s playroom, he reached for a crayon and a leaf of construction paper with the gravity of an architect, his smooth, creamed-coffee face immobile, a single mole dotting his cheek. He stared down at the paper through two dark, luminous eyes, in which the sharp and bright edges of things flashed in reflection. He blocked out the mosaic of murals on the walls, the stacks of glossy unopened books, the piles of blocks, and the blank-faced children, each lost in an opaque realm of secret activity.

The gleam from the track lighting glazed everything in the room as if it had all been brushed by a baker’s egg white. There was the smell of lemon disinfectant, which he did not like, which hung always in the air like a toxic cloud. There was the flicker from the farthest bulb at the ceiling that caught his eye again, as it had for several weeks, a distracting affront to the even order of light. But Sephiri turned his mind away from all of that now. There was only the sheet of white, the crayon in his hand, the images in his head. He’d had dreams before in his seven years on the earth, terrible visions from the Land of Air. There were the shadows that peeled themselves from the walls in his room and chased him out of his bed. There was the red creature that hid inside his mattress, the impish thing that cut through the springs, its incandescent eyes staring up at him through a dark, gaping hole.

Those dreams were not like the loveliness of his World of Water, the realm of deep blue and luminescence where Sephiri spent much of his time floating. He loved to drift far out to the Obsidians, as his sea friends called them. They were the tips of submerged mountains, enormous peaks that rose from the water like black pyramids from the deep. They marked where the invertebrates and the spiked beasts and the water plants ruled. Sephiri loved them all. He could speak there and be understood. The creatures living there gave him assurance that all he witnessed and heard in that place was real.

He wasn’t sure about the creatures flying through his dreams. They weren’t anything like the creatures of the Land of Air. The caterpillars he’d squeezed between his fingers in the backyard. The flies on the glass rim of his orange juice. The spiders that hung in corners. They were not like the other things he was able to keep a photograph of in his mind after one look: the number of tiles on a floor, the license plates of cars along their street, the label of ingredients of everything in the medicine cabinet. His mother locked the cabinet, but Sephiri was able to get it open anyway. He adored the Tylenol and cold medication boxes and containers, which he would line up and then line up again. There were lists of active and inactive ingredients, with marvelous arrangements of letters, which he had memorized without understanding how to pronounce any of them: acetaminophen, dextromethorphan, phenylephrine, anhydrous citric acid, potassium sorbate. He loved the sodiums madly: sodium borate, sodium chloride, sodium laurel, sodium laureth, sodium bicarbonate, sodium benzoate, sodium citrate.

When he was finished with the ingredients, he would focus on the letters that spelled WARNING on each container. He recognized this word from the order of the letters and knew it was the same word on the big sign above the red emergency door at the Takoma Park Autism Center, where he spent nearly every day. There were other things written next to WARNING on the boxes. He didn’t know what any of those words meant, but he was sure they were trying to save him from tasting something disgusting. Sephiri thought the words, especially in this case, probably referred to various kinds of foods he hated. Say, squash or chicken, for example. Or nasty sandwiches, which he was sure had to be any sandwich that was not peanut butter and jelly.

He had gotten off the safety cap and swallowed some pretty blue pills once and had to be rushed to the hospital, screaming. There were maddening lights, sounds, and touching. There were white sheets that chafed his skin and cold, shiny things. Worst of all, there were no bathtubs anywhere—no porcelain baths filled with blue water, where he could calm down, where he could get away, out to the three mountaintops that rose from the ocean.

The beings—terrifying tangle of fingers and voices—had put him in the shower instead. He’d acted out his fury and fits with his eyes clamped shut but had to take a shower anyway. More than losing his voice from the screaming, more than the stuff they did when he was finally finished vomiting and had been cleaned with that dreadful soap that smelled like the bottle in the cabinet that read POLISH REMOVER, Sephiri was furious that he hadn’t had a chance to finish ensuring order in the medicine cabinet. He hadn’t had the chance to finish saving the Tylenol boxes from disarray, from their disconnection to their places on the earth.

After the blue pills, and only after his mother fell asleep, he would slip out of bed to open the cabinet, to order and reorder. He promised the boxes and bottles that he would never swallow anything from them again. He had hurt their feelings without realizing it. He had learned his lesson. He would put everything back as it had been, with each item turned at the exact angle of origination, with the pill packs arranged as they were and the lock clicked back in place. And he would get up every night to sanctify what was behind that mirror in the bathroom over the sink, with the distant sound of a freight train’s midnight whistle as his cue. Such activity was a deep balm to Sephiri, a way to make everything in the world fit in its precise position on the planet. As all things should. Not the jungle of confusion he was forced to witness, to waddle in, every day of his life.

But there had been nothing like these flying creatures, these wild things that had somehow found him in his head. And for many days and nights, they swarmed the hinterlands of his mind, riding his thoughts, replacing the shadows and the mattress thing, replacing even the medicine cabinet lately. The glowing amber in their bellies was warm and everlasting. That much he knew. They reminded Sephiri of the oily liquid inside his mother’s dusty perfume bottles, which he had spent considerable time ordering in the twilight of dawn when the house was still and asleep, when there was less interference from all the other things assaulting his eyes and ears. And every time Sephiri thought of the locusts, he wanted to smile; it was something his mother had often tried to get him to do, something he’d seen demonstrated on the faces of others but had never understood how it worked.

Smiles intrigued him. He spent many days thinking about them, especially at bathtime, when his mother often smiled at him in the quiet. He would scream to let her know that he did not want to be soaped up right away, that he had an important visit to make to the Obsidians, where he might ask the Great Octopus about smiles and other things he did not understand. He flailed and splashed. He knocked the soap from her hands and kicked up enough water to pool on the bathroom floor. Then he would hear the loudness, the oncoming train in her voice. “Stop it stop it stop it stop it stop it.” She hissed and held on. He persisted. He hadn’t had the time to stop it stop it right then. He had to get into his boat before the water got cold, before the tub stopper was pulled out and the tributaries were drained.

When at last his mother seemed to understand his signals, when she was as soaked and outraged from all the splashing as if she had been dropped into a circus dumping tank, she left him alone to calm down, to absorb the turquoise and warmth, to disembark. It was at frustrating moments such as this that Sephiri wished that they spoke the same language. But he did not speak the language of Air, the land of his mother. He did not understand how things were done there or what occupied the species. There were different sounds and faces that somehow ruled them, and these were attached to meaning that was unintelligible to him. He had no patience for the stops and starts that fell from their mouths. There was no sharing of thought and feeling as there was with his friends of the deep. Sometimes, though, when his mother tired of chasing him, when he tired of screaming, she held him, and he allowed himself to be held. They felt each other. That was as close as Sephiri had ever gotten to reaching his mother and penetrating the Land of Air.

He had discovered as early as two years old that Air and Water were different places with different ways and language. He had been playing with some colored blocks on the floor. He had wanted to line the blocks up and then line them up again. He remembered his mother picking up different blocks, saying something, and pointing. He did not look at her face, but he could see that finger pointing from the corner of his eye and her hand holding the block. She took his hand and placed it on each block, and he felt as if he was being pulled apart. He didn’t want to hold the blocks. He didn’t want to think about their shape and color and mimic her sounds. He had wanted only to line them up and line them up again. To ensure that they were where they were supposed to be. He tried to explain. But his mother did not comprehend him, and the more he tried to get her to understand, the more it became clear to him that she would never know his language.

Sephiri gripped the crayon and looked down at the paper, thinking instead of the fat-bellied locusts of his dreams again, for he did not want to dwell on things that would make him cry. Why had the locusts come? In his dreams, he saw them growing to bursting, pushing up and out of the earth, taking flight. Above his head, they were waiting, rising, and hovering, as if by their gathering they anticipated something. He began guiding the crayon, his hand moving effortlessly. He first drew the foreground and then sketched a vast plain. In the center, he constructed two towers with a giant iron gate connecting them and an enormous structure behind them. Sephiri didn’t know what it was, but it reminded him of the coat closet he locked himself into sometimes at home, but bigger. A giant black box that held things, with a voice that called to him from its farthest corner.

“Come here . . .”

He did not recognize the voice, and he was not sure what the two words meant. Especially together. He’d heard them said before at the Autism Center, and sometimes, he thought, his mother said them too. But he couldn’t decide if the two words were the same as other phrases he’d heard: “come home” or “can hear.” But all that was too much to figure out now, since the other things were so clear to him at last. His hand moved deftly, sketching enormous mountains in the background, a cloud of locusts flying over their peaks.

Sephiri furiously continued drawing, and at the height of his fever, he snapped his crayon. He threw the drawing down and watched the paper slide under the table. He was angry that his hand had not been able to keep up with his mind, one of many things that frustrated him about being in the Land of Air. He couldn’t stand the different regimens and schedules that were not of his own making, how the people were always telling and talking and asking, until it all became a sort of noise that ran together in his head. This place was filled with air, not water, where he felt at home.

He could float out to the realness of his World of Water, where the sea was an endless expanse as turquoise as the liquid in his ­bathtub. Where he didn’t have to try to understand the strange sounds of words dripping from mouths. He could head to his ­desired destination anytime he wanted, with only his little wooden boat gliding toward the three great black rocks that rose from the ocean. The dolphin waited for his company there, and the Great Octopus sat in majesty in his iridescent lair on the ocean floor. What concerned him in Air did not concern him in Water. He did not need the laws of physics to rein in his terrors, frustrations, and confusions there. He did not need to spin or bang or rock or flap. He could forget about the creatures flying in his dreams, the voice in the giant black box, the meaning of sounds and faces and smiles. He could forget about the words of Air and speak freely in Water, where the language of men was as indecipherable to his friends of the deep as it was to him. An encrypted thing to ponder briefly and release, like the dialogue of wolves and birds in flight.

Product Image 1 of 1

A Novel

Time of the Locust

A Novel

Travel into the heart and mind of an extraordinary autistic boy in this deeply imaginative debut novel of a mother’s devotion, a father’s punishment, and the power of love.

Sephiri is an autistic boy who lives in a world of his own making, where he dwells among imagined sea creatures that help him process information in the “real world” in which he is forced to live. But lately he has been having dreams of a mysterious place, and he starts creating fantastical sketches of this strange, inner world.

Brenda, Sephiri’s mother, struggles with raising her challenged child alone. Her only wish is to connect with him—a smile on his face would be a triumph. Meanwhile, Sephiri’s father, Horus, is sentenced to life in prison, making life even lonelier for Brenda and Sephiri. Yet prison is still not enough to separate father and son. In the seventh year of his imprisonment and the height of his isolation, Horus develops supernatural mental abilities that allow him to reach his son. Memory and yearning carry him outside his body, and through the realities of their ordeals and dreamscape, Horus and Sephiri find each other—and find hope in ways never imagined.

Deftly portrayed by the remarkable and talented up-and-comer Morowa Yejidé, Time of the Locust is a brilliant narrative about the psychological realms of solitude, youth, and wonder. At its heart, this is a harrowing, surreal, and redemptive journey to the union of a family.

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Praise

"At times almost mystical in its intensity, Yejidé’s prose brings lyricism to her dark subject matter and unhappy characters, eventually introducing a kind of magical restoration to her shattered fictional family."

"At times almost mystical in its intensity, Yejidé’s prose brings lyricism to her dark subject matter and unhappy characters, eventually introducing a kind of magical restoration to her shattered fictional family."

– Kirkus

"There are characters who hook you from the second you meet them on the page. Sephiri, the autistic boy at the heart of Time of the Locust is one of them."

– Essence Magazine

"Yejidé is a talented writer . . . . [Time of the Locust] is strong and original, and even the minor characters come alive."

– The Washington Post

"Yejidé is poised to make her mark with a novel that might be described as one of family connection--but encompasses so much more... When that father, Horus, develops supernatural abilities and connects with his son, strange and powerful things happen, but the focus is less on fantasy than on the fantastic power of love to bind and protect us."

– Washingtonian Magazine

"Time of the Locust is jaw-dropping awesome. A superb debut work of magic realism and finalist for the Pen/Bellwether Prize for socially engaged fiction, this is the book for you, your friends and your book club. From the world of the autistic prepubescent son, to the mother who raises him and the father that sired him, and the situation that connects and separates them all, this story will cause you to look at the world around you differently whenever you look up from it. Read it!"

– Ebony Magazine

"Beautiful prose conveys the sadness and fractured selves of these characters, who are both strong and fragile. The depth of pain can make for difficult reading, but the rendering of Sephiri’s interior life, in particular, is arresting, and the novel is challenging and memorable."

– Publishers Weekly

"A unique and astounding debut."

– Lalita Tademy, New York Times Bestselling author of Cane River and Red River

"A stunning, magical novel about the power of love between an imprisoned father and an autistic son. Original, compelling, Yejidé explores the human psyche in a dreamscape world."

– Jewell Parker Rhodes, author of Douglass' Women

"Arrayed against seven kinds of imprisonment--autism, gluttony, self-hate, inanition, racism, vengefulness, and a fiendish species of incarceration in a supermax Colorado prison--in this auspicious debut novel, stands the volitional force of unfettered love. Morowa Yejidé’s depiction of the inner world of the parents of an autistic child (the father unfairly imprisoned and the mother sagging under the load of single parentage) is rendered with compassionate aplomb; her brilliant depiction of the mental weather of their autistic son is matchless. Time of the Locust is a rich and rewarding story of redemption for those who believe, as the poet Richard Lovelace wrote, Stone walls do not a prison make."

– J. Michael Lennon, author of Norman Mailer: A Double Life

"Time of the Locust is a brave and mesmerizing journey into the mysteries of autism, solitary confinement, and inner struggle told with dazzling imagery and passion. In this luminous first novel, the crossroads between the dream world and the physical world is a place where physical chains--the child's autistic mind, the maximum security facility where the father is incarcerated--are of no consequence. It is a place where love is born, and is allowed to grow and thrive. A soaring odyssey of the human spirit."

– Kaylie Jones, author of Lies My Mother Never Told Me

"Time of the Locust is a fearless rendering of a family’s struggle to cope with single motherhood, fatherlessness, and a child’s autism. The physical, psychological, and philosophical prisons in which the characters find themselves transport us to places we’ve never even imagined--and higher spiritual planes are found in the lowest of realms. Reminiscent of Keri Hulme’s magnificent novel The Bone People, Morowa Yejidé's novel explores a world of chaos and the infinite promise of the mind."

– Johnny Temple, publisher and editor in chief of Akashic Books

"Time of the Locust is a tale both ethereal and heartbreaking; it lures us into the deep waters of emotional isolation and psycho-spiritual connection. Yejide paints a deftly rendered portrait of love without expectation."

– Erica Simone Turnipseed, author of A Love Noire and Hunger

Read an Excerpt

Time of the Locust

A Novel

By Morowa Yejide

Excerpts

Chapter 1

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About the Author

Morowa Yejidé’s short stories have appeared in the Istanbul Literary Review, Ascent Aspirations Magazine, Underground Voices, the Japan Times, and the Adirondack Review. Her story “Tokyo Chocolate” was nominated in 2009 for the Pushcart Prize. She was the 2010 recipient of the Norris Church Mailer Scholarship from Wilkes University, and she is also a PEN/Faulkner Writers in Schools author. Time of the Locust was a 2012 finalist for the national PEN/Bellwether Prize for socially engaged fiction. Yejidé lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and sons.